Number Seventy News

And, actually, written by a Norwegian, Roy Jacobsen.  It’s a novel called, in English translation, “The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles” set in WWII in the Finnish Winter, when the inhabitants of a small town set fire to it and leave, to prevent the invading Russians from using it as a base.  The hero is a faux-simple man who stays on, collects together the rag-tag of rejects and hopeless cases from the Russian Army to form a group of loggers – and together they survive the bitter weather and the Finnish victory over the Russians.  It has an allegorical feel – must read it again.  Roy Jacobsen is wery well known and respected in Norway, I’m told. It’s a great pity this is his only book in translation.  Bits of it reminded me of Hamsun’s simple farmer characters in”The growth of the Soil”.

Young jazz pianist doing a solo set at the NCEM.  Funny, although he is brilliant I felt the need for a rhythm section on some numbers, to vary the sound a bit and give it some shape.  Keith Jarrett I like solo better than with a group – reverse for Simcock – who played with Tim Garland here a few months ago.

The armchair traveller. – first to Stockholm and Southern Sweden with Stieg Larsson and his amazing trilogy starting with “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”  Clearly the work of an obsessive – every journey is lovingly detailed, street by street, bus by bus, tunnelbana by tunnelbana, and we are always told what a main character is wearing – also a lot of computer detail which is way beyond my ken- but the story is fantastic, perhaps literally so, though Larsson would have you believe otherwise.  Very tightly plotted, the violence quite extreme in places but kept in proportion to the investigative business. And Lisbeth Salander, the main female character, is unique.  Absolutely brilliant !

Unlike the first of two New York novels: “The Believers” by Zoe Heller.  A family drama where none of the characters excites much interest or sympathy, poorly written, lots of cliches and which doesn’t enhance one’s understanding of the world or human nature.  It might pass as a couple of episodes of a tv sitcom.

“Netherland” on the other hand, with it’s cricket-playing Dutch exile in New York, a passive man to whom things mostly just happen, is well worth the read. Chuck Ramkissoon, the cricket-playing, scam-promoting West Indian is the real hero, along with all the other exiles who make up most of the population of New York and bring their own local customs with them.  The shadow of 9/11 is there in the background – saps the dutchman’s will.  Some nice pen pictures of The Hague, incidental to the New York stuff.

The man is of course a legend – but his Leeds gig was rather a disappointment for those of us who were looking for the legendary numbers.  Mostly he played stuff from his new CD which is a tribute to Townes van Zandt and, to my mind, all a bit samey and lacking the lyrical bite which is what I like about Earle.

The support act was a Texan called Rhett Miller – absolutely dire, as support acts sometimes are.  Mostly he shouted and bashed his guitar, sometimes he gyrated like an uncertain Elvis, and as most of the audience was in its sixties, there were no encouraging teenage screams.

Golden days beside a Norwegian Lake.  Long scarves of cloud halfway up the mountainside in the morning, suddenly turned to fire as the sun lifts over the opposite ridge.  First flakes of ice at the edge of the lake.  Frost staying most of the day where the sun doesn’t reach at this season. Forestry tracks, as always, made for foresters, not walkers. A paraglider swooping into the valley. Sitting at Sunday lunch in a house halfway up a mountain watching the snow swirl and coat the forests. My daughter’s cosy small house – obviously insulated way beyond anything we build in the UK, and heated by a woodstove or an air source heat-pump (warmpumps, they are called over there).  Grey days too, beautiful in their own way, time to hunger down and eat cake.

Apart from the stupidity of having to stay overnight at Stansted because you can’t get there from the North in time to chekc in for a 10.30 am flight, journey there went quite well.  Note however, that the bedroom decor in the Stansted Airport Radisson hotel (and, my spies tell me, in the Oslo one too) is absolutely the most hideous assemblage of bad taste in lighting, decoration, carpets, furniture, mirrors etc etc you have ever seen.  Part bad enough to be kitsch, part just demented. Who stays in these places by free choice one wonders.  Anyway, Ryanair behaved itself and showed up the rocky coast of Norway nicely as we descended to Torp.  Then the Telemark Express bus rolled us through golden woods and past autumnal lakes to our destination (of which more separately).

Returning, the bus ploughed through heavy rain most of the way, but Norwegian roads seem to be designed to shed water rather than retain it in puddles, so no problem.  Again Ryanair did Ok and with only 40 minutes between touch-down and train departure we nonetheless made it.  At this point puzzlement sets in.  The Cross Country Stansted to Brimingham stopped for signals outside Stansted, waited at least 5 minutes for a platform at Cambridge, dallied at Ely and March, and yet got into Peterborough on time. Another example of the totally absurd timing practices on Britain’s railways, whereby everything is so generously timed it’s almost impossible to ruin the company statistics by being late.  But realatively troule-free there and back again.